Battle of Rumaila
The Battle of Rumaila, also known as the Battle of the Causeway or the Battle of the Junkyard, was a controversial engagement that took place on March 2, 1991, near the Rumaila oil field in the Euphrates Valley of southern Iraq, when the U.S. Army forces, mostly the 24th Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey and air elements of the 101st Airborne Division, engaged and nearly annihilated a large column of withdrawing Iraqi Republican Guard armored forces during the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. Battle Iraqi Republican Guards were engaged by the U.S. forces while attempting to reach and cross the Lake Hammar causeway and escape northward toward Baghdad. Most of the five-mile-long Iraqi caravan of several hundred vehicles was first boxed into a kill zone and then in the course of the next five hours systematically devastated by the U.S. 24th Infantry Division, including its armored forces, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and five artillery battalions. Helicopters of the 101st Airborne Division (from the 101st Aviation Regiment and the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade) also joined in for the attack and were credited with destroying 14 armored personnel carriers, eight BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launchers, four enemy helicopters, 56 trucks and two SA-6 radars, and with seriously damaging a bridge across the Euphrates.E. M. Flanagan, Lightning: The 101st in the Gulf War The attack continued until the trapped vehicles were all destroyed, including at least 39 T-72 tanks and 52 other armored vehicles from the elite 1st Armored Division "Hammurabi",Hammurabi Division, GlobalSecurity.org resulting in the destruction of one of its brigades.Stephen Alan Bourque, John W. Burdan, The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 Persian Gulf War McCaffrey reported the elimination of 187 armored vehicles, 43 artillery pieces and over 400 trucks.Richard S. Lowry, The Gulf War Chronicles: A Military History of the First War With Iraq The battle was one-sided and Iraqi attempts to return fire proved to be almost completely ineffective, as during the engagement only one U.S. soldier was injured and two U.S. armored vehicles were lost (an M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle damaged by enemy fire and an M1 Abrams tank set on fire by a nearby explosion of an Iraqi truck).Desert Storm Chronology, March 1991 (" ... one wounded, one M-2A1 Bradley damaged, and one M-1A1 Abrams lost when secondary explosion of a T-72 set sleeping bags stowed on the M-1 on fire.") A bus with women and children was also reportedly destroyed, which later troubled many U.S. soldiers. Surviving Iraqi soldiers were either taken prisoner, fled on foot or swam to safety. Controversy The all-out attack on the Iraqi column, sparked by Iraqis opening fire on an U.S. patrol which had wandered into their path of retreat, took place two days after the war had been officially halted by a unilateral U.S. ceasefire and just as the Iraqi government and UN coalition forces were scheduled to begin formal peace talks the next morning. These circumstances provoked a heated debate over whether McCaffrey was justified in his decision to destroy the column, and why had the 24th Division moved during the ceasefire into the path of the withdrawing Iraqis in the first place.Probing a Slaughter, Newsweek, May 2000Gulf War crimes?, Salon.com, May 25, 2000 U.S. Lt. Gen. Ronald H. Griffith said to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, "It was just a bunch of tanks in a train by trailer truck, and he Barry McCaffrey made it a battle. He made it a battle when it was never one."Seymour Hersh, OVERWHELMING FORCE, The New Yorker, May 22, 2000 However, McCaffrey was exonerated by an Army inquiry, and an inquiry by the U.S. Congress also did not find any fault in the incident.Rumaila, Battle of, The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military, 2001 See also * Allegations of misconduct against General McCaffrey * Highway of Death References Category:1991 in Iraq Rumaila Rumaila Rumaila Category:Military scandals